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Jonathan Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, is leading a crackdown on privacy violations by tech companies.

It was a fairly obscure privacy violation as privacy violations go. Google's engineers wanted certain aspects of Google+ to work on iDevices, but Apple had built privacy protections into its Safari browser that stymied them. The search giant's engineers wanted the browser to recognize that a user was signed into Google, so that the smartphone surfers could +1 stuff, mainly ads. So the engineers came up with a trick to get around Safari's block, as detailed by the Wall Street Journal, which outed the company after security researchers saw what was going on.

That little trick is going to prove costly for Google. The WSJ cites unnamed government officials in a story that says the Federal Trade Commission will be hitting Google with a $22.5 million fine for circumventing Apple users' privacy settings. This would be the biggest fine ever levied by the FTC, reports the WSJ. But it's still relatively tiny for Google, which easily makes that amount in a day. So does it matter?

After Google's Buzz debacle -- a privacy violation that was far from obscure -- the Federal Trade Commission essentially sentenced the tech company to a 20-year probation, during which it has to undergo biannual privacy audits and not do crazy privacy-invading stuff. The FTC has issued similar sentences for Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, essentially giving itself more power to regulate and levy fines on these companies than it ordinarily would have. As I have argued before, it's how the FTC is hacking U.S.'s fairly weak privacy laws to make them stronger.

For the next two decades, the two companies that come up most often in the discussion of privacy -- Facebook and Google -- have a probation officer. (Only Apple needs to be added to the mix.) Privacy missteps by these companies may now lead to multimillion dollar fines (which get sent over to the U.S. Treasury). The FTC is almost certainly looking closely, for example, at Facebook's recent email visibility fiasco, during which it hid some users' email addresses on their Facebook profiles and accidentally went into Facebook users' phones and changed the contact information for their friends.

When I spoke to Justin Brookman, a consumer privacy specialist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, last week about the Facebook fiasco, he thought that a fine for Google in the cookie matter might mean a fine for Facebook in the email matter.

"[A] lot of this could be contingent upon whether they're already looking at Google for dropping behavioral advertising DoubleClick cookies on Safari browsers (which Google also said was not intentional)," he wrote by email. "The FTC seems sensitive to being seen as treating major players like Facebook and Google equivalently, so if they're already investigating Google, that may pressure them to want to look at Facebook as well."

Privacy mistakes may be getting more expensive for companies under FTC's watch.